Creating a Frankenstein table

My friend Erin gave me a guitar-pick table a few weeks ago, and around the same time, I found a rusty tension pole lamp that had lost its top and bottom tensioners at an estate sale. The shades were a soft plastic, with a pattern painted on them, in decent if dirty condition. I think I paid $15 for the pole lamp, which some may have thought a ridiculous price for junk. I figured I'd pay that much for a set of three shades if I went on a hunt, so I bought it.

As with many things, I can get an idea, but then I have to ruminate on how to bring it to completion.

• I disassembled the lamp completely. 
• I washed the shades (they looked much better than expected once I got them clean).
• I tried scouring the rust off the pole. Success, in that the rust was gone and nothing had rusted through, but the finish was ruined. Decided to keep sanding them, not to remove the finish, but to get everything as smooth as possible.
• Went to the hardware store and got some Krylon spray primer for metal and some Krylon gold metallic paint.
• I rigged some bungee cords to hold the three sections of the pole while I primed and painted them from all angles. This allowed me to hang them in the middle of the garage while I painted them, then carefully move them out of the way while they dried (and I could get the car back into the garage). 
• I think I put two thin coats of primer down, then three coats of metallic gold paint. After that, two coats of a clear coat to give it a better sheen and to protect the color.

• I got some Howard's "Restor-A-Finish" at Woodcraft (same place I got the small grommets) and gave the scuffed-up legs a little going-over. It didn't completely obscure the scuffs, but it did pretty well. Super-easy to use, too!
• I hunted around for table grommets that would fit the pole snugly. I found a hard plastic grommet with a metallic gold finish at Ace, but it was a little too small. I thought I'd sand it out with my Dremel. After a little time to think about all the things that would go wrong with that idea, I found two grommets like you'd see in a desk, in brown, to go with the wood tones of the table. They also came with some snap-on covers for routing cords. These grommets were just a tiny bit too big for the pole. More on this later.

• Now to decide where to fit the lamp into the table. Centered, or offset in a corner? I decided that the larger surface area of the tabletop afforded by putting the pole off in a corner made more sense. This is where I tried measuring and engineering a point to drill and ultimately just put the grommet on the table and scooted it around and eyballed the measurement from as many angles as I could.

Upper shelf, pilot hole drilled

Lower shelf, pilot hole drilled

• I drilled a tiny pilot hole. Then I drilled a slightly smaller pilot hole and used a plumb-bob to mark the same in the lower shelf of the table. 

• With the pilot hole drilled into the top, I got my hole saw kit out and found the hole saw that matched the grommet and drilled that. 

Upper shelf with hole cut and grommet in place

• Then I double-checked the pilot hole on the bottom by placing the pole through the upper shelf. I'm glad I did that, it was about a half-inch off. Not sure how I made the error, but it was fixed before I had a problem on my hands. 

Checking the fit before I cut the lower shelf hole. Also checking the height with another floor lamp

Once I figured out where to cut the lower hole, I cut that, then decided I needed to remove about 6" from the pole. The lowest section of the pole made the most sense to cut (there were some holes drilled into it near the first joint that I wanted to hide). I had to buy a pipe cutter that would fit the 1.5" wide pole, so that set me back $20, but now I have it for the next project like this. 

I fit the grommet into the lower shelf, then expoxied the cap in place, pointing the gap in the cap towards the back leg of the table. The cord is going to go through that. 

I glued the upper grommet in place with carpenter's glue.

Now remember how I said the grommet was slightly larger than the pole? The pole wobbled, but the inside diameter of the grommet was about 1-2 mm larger than the pole. Not a lot of wobble, but I still wanted it gone.

I got some thin O-rings at the hardware store when I got that pipe cutter, and shimmed the pole against the grommet top and bottom. 

Sorting the Summer haul

It's been a really big first year for this hobby of collecting and selling collectible items. I've learned so much, and have been emboldened by the great feedback and sales I've enjoyed in particular at Vintage Garage Chicago from June to October. I can't wait for the sale to start back up in April.

It's easier to sell stuff when people can see and touch it, I've found, and so Etsy sales are nice when they happen, but pretty infrequent.

I've fleshed out more of an online presence, by registering the domain thecuratedcave.com, establishing an email address (thecuratedcave@gmail), setting up an Instagram account, and tying it to a Facebook page, too. So this winter I'll be adding items to the Etsy shop (you can't see what people don't know you have); but it's also a way of cataloging what I have acquired, so I can set up my next booth in April at Vintage Garage Chicago.

Pyrex Coffee Decanter

Here's an unusual item I found at the Kane County Flea Market in July, 2016.

There is no mark at all on this item, but because it has an identical cork and neck wrap as Pyrex's promotional bottles for Jim Beam bourbon, I'm pretty confident that this is also Pyrex. It appears to me to be a repurposed large flask from Pyrex's lab ware line, wrapped and corked like the smaller Beam bottles, in a chrome stand with a candle holder to keep the coffee warm.

I sold this thing so quickly, I never got measurements, so everything is approximate here.

I'd say the stand stood about 18-20" high. Volume of the flask? Not sure. Maybe a litre?

So I sold it at Vintage Garage Chicago in July 2016 to a guy who fell in love with it on the spot. He said he was going to keep it on his bar and use it in the winter months for mulled wine and glög. Made some good profit on it, too!

Photo booth

I've been spending a lot of time in the past few months acquiring and planning to list a lot of items, mostly smalls like barware and dishes to sell on my Etsy store. I seem to be acquiring faster than I have been listing these items, but here's my process.

After I find these treasures, I give them a gentle cleaning. Then I stage and photograph them. I'm interested in providing a neutral and consistent setting for the items, so that my store has a consistent look, but also so that the items stand out against their setting. I want a rugged, masculine setting, so I use bare wood props and a brown paper backdrop.

I have this shallow shelf unit from InterMetro. I've referred to it as a baker's rack for years. It's just useful enough to keep, but I never know quite how to use it in all the houses I've owned over the past fifteen years or so that I've had it. I've been in my current house for about 3 years, and I've had it on my back (enclosed) porch all this time. It's been heaped with things until recently. The natural light on this porch makes great lighting for photography; I added a small light with a full-spectrum CFL to help with shadows.

On the top of the rack is a small shelf. I set the roll of contractor's paper (available at any home-improvement store) and drew down a length of it down the back of the rack. This photo was taken facing southwest, so you can see some afternoon sun bleeding through the paper.

The photo booth

The photo that will go into the Etsy listing.

My camera is a simple one, mounted on a tripod. 

I try to set up the shot as straight and centered as I can, but I wind up doing a little adjusting in Photoshop, then upload to Etsy.

As part of my pre-listing prep, of course, I do my research on the item, maker, value, and condition, so I can arrive at a fair price. 

Wishing your ass a happy birthday

One of my employees acquired an old family bible recently at a yard sale. She prefers to read in Spanish, so after buying this old tome, she wondered if maybe I'd be interested in it. The pages were intact, but the leather spine was missing and the two covers were consequently completely divorced from the rest of the book. There were a few color plates among the pages.

There was no publication or printing date, but judging by the style of the cover, I'd have guessed late 19th century. Generally, it's not worth much, particularly in its current condition, according to my ex-FIL, who is a book dealer and collector.

As I was flipping through it, I discovered this little card inside. It reads

Birthday Greetings

Of all the days in the year this is
Your Day. Many Happy Returns,
From your friends at
The Thornton & Minor Sanitorium

I was thinking (honestly, kind of hoping) this was a mental sanitarium. Nope, wrong end.

I think I might frame this and hang it in the bathroom.

Certifying a Jens Risom arm chair--updated

Ain't she a beauty?

Back in 2005 or 2006, I was driving through my town in a cold rain and I went past a house where someone was moving out. There was a big heap of trash, but I saw this chair with some bright orange cushions. I pulled over, gave it a cursory inspection (Yes, it's a chair, not obviously falling apart) and put it in the back of the car.

The cushions were dirty, wet, and showing some wear. All in all, they grossed me out. I stood the chair in my garage, and in setting it down, it was clear to me that the sturdy frame was in very good condition.  I figured out how to remove the cushions, measured them, then hit eBay up for a funky fabric. I had a new project.

I found an upholsterer to fix the cushions up for a reasonable price, and I just beamed when it was ready. I really like this chair.

And oh! is it comfortable! It's a nice height. For a midcentury chair, it's very comfortable for anyone to sit in. Some MCM chairs are almost comically low. This was a chair designed to sit beside a desk or at a dining table. The broad, deep seat accommodates nearly every body's width and height. The arms are sturdy, and the feet stand very square on the floor, so even an elderly person who has some mobility issues can lean on this chair as she sits or rises.

The UNIVAC inventory sticker

The most curious thing I noticed about it right away, though, was the UNIVAC inventory sticker. That made me think for ten years that it was just some anonymous 1960s designer and manufacturer. Growing up in Aurora, IL, we had Lyon Metal and AllSteel Manufacturing, who made utilitarian items for workplaces. I've seen a lot of that sort of midcentury knockoff design. I noted this chair's untapered legs and spare ornamentation, and just figured it was something like an AllSteel chair, only made of wood.

Then last week, on a FaceBook Midcentury design group, someone posted an interior shot of a UNIVAC computer room (back when computers needed their own rooms), and I posted pictures of this chair. A comment suggested it "might be Risom" and I started a Google Image Search (GIS) for Risom armchairs and found an identical chair attributed to Jens Risom in the UK.  Well, that was good enough for me. 

Pay no attention to the mess in the background.

I noticed one of the times I had the chair upside-down that in the four corners of the underside, the braces have a maker's mark of a "B" inside a "G", inside a diamond. Huh. Who's that? I wondered. Back to Google. That led me to another conversation on designaddicts.com. While users there had posted some pictures of the mark, no one knew what it represented. We don't even know yet whether it says BG or GB.

Have I mentioned how much I love this chair?

However, user rtrindt had a chair just like mine (different fabric, of course). I said, "That's Risom" and provided the link to the UK site. User "leif erikson" said of my link, 'that's not definitive proof.' So we found some. User jkome found an old catalog of Risom's showroom with Knoll at Chicago's Merchandise Mart. In that picture, you can see a group of these chairs around a table. That's good, but it's not proof. 

Then another citation in jkome's next post shows several photos of a pair of these chairs. One of these photos is the paper tag on the underside, which state both "A Jens Risom Design" and "Risom Manufacturing Corp. North Grosvenordale, Conn." That proves it. This is a Jens Risom chair. Those two chairs in the 1stdibs posting are as described as teak, but I'm not so sure. Could be walnut, like mine.

Now to figure out who BG/GB is...

--
2-14-16
I was watching Mad Men last night (the 2nd half of Season 7 was released recently on Netflix) when I saw two examples of this chair in a scene with Peggy. I was maybe a little too excited to have this validation about this chair, because, let's face it, Mad Men is largely a televised museum of MCM furnishings and textiles. Here's a screenshot. You can see the chairs with orange-red fabric behind Peggy as she walks off-camera.

A pair of Risom arm chairs (center) alongside the desks in Mad Men S7 E11.

Bowie Obituaries

It's taken me a long time to write my own ideas of David Bowie's death, and my obituary for him. I had come to a point in my music where Bowie's new music was largely peripheral in my attention after the rather ironically named Never Let Me Down. Heathen and a few other things I heard I liked, but I didn't rush out and buy them, either. 

At Christmastime, I had a weekday off of all responsibilities and wandered into a thrift shop, where I found the Sound And Vision CDs for $2. No book, no box, but the most important part for only $2! I loaded them into the CD player in my car and started a big Bowie kick. I pulled all my Bowie records down and put them on the shelf in the living room and immersed myself in Bowie for about two weeks before his birthday on January 8. And Blackstar got me excited again. Really excited. KEXP held "Intergalactic Bowie Day" on January 8, and I listened all day long. I kept swimming in an ocean of Bowie's music, and I've felt (about Bowie and many other records I've played in the last six months), that I'm hearing the music as though for the first time. The hair on my arms stand up when I hear music again. It's like a blockage in my brain has moved aside, and music is painting my neurons like they did when I was 15, 16 years old.

Then of course, January 10, I woke for work, grabbed my phone off the night stand, and saw the headline from the Chicago Tribune, that Bowie had died.

I was crushed. Gutted. KEXP responded as they could only be expected to: a shell-shocked second "Intergalactic Bowie Day," but this time the stories were memoirs, no longer quite the same ebullient admiration of an audience wondering of the next thing on the horizon. From now on, all we can do is line the records up on the shelf of time and point to the intersections of his life and the recordings. He was really gone. I wept as though I had lost a favorite uncle. I felt like a fool, to weep for a dead celebrity. But I then realized just how much Bowie had meant to me all these years.

I couldn't bring myself to listen to the album Blackstar for a couple of weeks. I had to just love his records like I did when he was alive. Just love those records. Not this one. I finally said, "Okay, David, what do you want to say to me?" and I listened (thanks to Amazon Prime Music streaming, I could hear it all). I heard in the first track his omniscient voice assuring me, while the music fluidly plucked the piano off Hunky Dory, the backup vocals from Ziggy and Aladdin Sane, the stomp and sway from Station To Station...it was as though he condensed one of his greatest hits records down into a song from beyond the grave. His lyrics assured me that there is only love and light after death, and that he had ceased fearing stepping over that threshold. And I finally accepted his death and wept harder than I had about his death. And finally, by the end of the record, I was reconciled with his death.

Since then, I've enjoyed three obituaries particularly well: Stewart Berman's and Tom Ewing's on Pitchfork, and Chris Jones' in the Chicago Tribune:

Profound was Bowie's sense of detachment from his own celebrity. Heck, maybe even unique. Thus he was able to create a separate character — David Bowie — allowing him to live as David Robert Jones in relative quiet. David Bowie was the performance-art project of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, whose name, of course, was David Robert Jones.

And

Bowie wrote, composed and filmed his own end, much as Shakespeare seemed to do in "The Tempest," actually. And in so doing he was able to offer his fans and lovers a sense of completion — and we all need a sense of completion — while buying his real self some honest-to-God privacy.

And yet I can say that Blackstar was given to us as a deeply personal and loving tribute to us, his fans.